


We Carry On

by SilverMiko



Series: Sight Unseen [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mild Angst, Romance, Slow Burn, introducing the man who isn't Sherlock, special guest start Mycroft's umbrella, the time in between
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 16:29:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10620741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverMiko/pseuds/SilverMiko
Summary: The man once called Sherlock Holmes should have his head deep in the Game, not longing for the things he left behind. Molly Hooper is trying to move on, even if it means being set up with blokes who look way too much like a 'dead man'. She might even believe it when she tells herself she's happy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set between Series 2 and 3. Sorry for the long time between chapters, got very busy with work and Anime Boston happening. 
> 
> Onwards and upwards to more delicious angst!

Sometimes he can fool himself into thinking the other cities are London. The whoosh of the Paris Metro might be the Tube, the accents in Melbourne could be close enough sounding to home. But every time he saw a woman in the crowd with long chestnut hair they could never be her. Some things could never be replaced, Sherlock was learning. It was little over a year into the most covert mission of all, a ghost taking down the spider’s network. Moriarty’s web flung far and wide, but he was making progress bit by bit. The Game kept him sustained the best it could, and he elected to do his best to ignore the ever growing empty feeling building within him. Wasn’t this where he thrived the most, loved the best? Love, what an old-fashioned verb. He should hate it, because it was a word that dared people to care. To show sentiment. It wasn’t logical. But it was growing harder to pretend he didn’t care, and John Watson was to blame for that. No, even before John he had let others in his life; Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, her. Especially her, always there in the background, always a lifeline when he needed it, the woman who had literally brought him to life and then led him to death.  
He tried so badly to ignore it, but he missed them. He missed Molly Hooper. The awkward small talk, morbid jokes, excited discussions over experiments, her soft smile and attempts to make awful cafeteria coffee taste palatable. Sometimes he even missed her damn cat. What was he coming to? He would tell himself he had just gotten used to her as part of the routine, but he’d be lying. When had she become so important to him?  
He knew when, of course, no use asking questions as if he didn’t already know the answer.  
But he buried it down with one lead after another, losing more and more pieces of the man he had been in the process. The tousled curls were getting longer, he didn’t bother to shave as routinely, and his fashion sense had taken a swan dive. And yet there he was, at some tobbacchi in Florence, buying a postcard. He had done his best to still honor his promise to her, to let her know he was alive, but it was more than just that he owed her more than a scrap of paper would cover. Yesterday had been Christmas, and he found himself wishing more than anything that she would walk in the door wearing that ridiculously tight, wonderful black dress again.  
It hadn’t helped that Mycroft’s gift had reached him as well, a single picture that would have been scrubbed from the private server it existed on. Molly Hooper, in her giant coat with a white knit hat on smiling brightly at a group of carolers outside Bart’s. Of course, Mycroft had simply wrote, “your home away from home is still intact” as if it was the hospital Sherlock cared about. They both knew the real subtext of Mycroft’s words, and it had made him scoff reading it when the email had come through. What did Mycroft think he was? Some sappy fool? Apparently so, because a moment later he felt his chest constrict as he memorized every curve and line of her face.  
She was his oldest friend, after all, why shouldn’t even the great Sherlock Holmes be exempt from that sort of fondness? Because he had set those terms himself, and repeated them over and over for John to hear. He almost even believed himself that Molly was his ‘oldest friend’ too.  
Right. Send the postcard, get head sorted, and focus. He wasn’t Sherlock Holmes anymore, he had no business dwelling on that life and all that might have been.  
Being maudlin didn’t suit the Great Detective, after all.  
He paid for the postcard and borrowed a pen, scribbling the first thing that came to his mind on the back, “Start with the riding crop.” With a curt ‘grazie’ he dropped the card off in the nearby post and pulled his secondhand parka tighter around his frame. Since he was in the mood it seemed to miss things, his Belstaff was rapidly rising on that list.  
Lost in dueling thoughts of wistfulness and disgust at even feeling such a thing, Sherlock failed to notice the two men trailing behind him across Ponte Vecchio.

 

***

Molly Hooper was furious. As she stomped across a narrow alley in Earl’s Court, Meena was hot on her heels shouting after her. Finally, Molly stopped and spun on her heels.  
“Are you making fun of me, then? Is that it?”  
“No of course not! Molls, I wouldn’t do that!”  
“Then why, Meena, why did you bring him?” she asked, the last word seething out from between clenched teeth.  
She had finally agreed to let Meena set up a small group outing to introduce Molly to the bloke Meena kept trying to fix her up with. What she hadn’t expected to see walking through the pub door was a tall man with a mess of curls in not-quite a Belstaff but close enough. It had floored her for a moment, the world freezing in the spot. Until she blinked, and realized it wasn’t him.  
No, it was Tom, the bloke she was supposedly going to get on with well.  
He smiled bashfully at them, apologize for being late. A closure on the District line, you know it goes, he said blithely.  
Molly had frowned, stood up, and stormed out. It wasn’t funny, not one bit. Meena had to have known, she had to have seen the resemblance. No one was that stupid.  
“Okay look, I’ll admit I see it as looks go but Tom is not the same sort of bloke as your fancy detective.”  
“He’s not my anything, he’s dead,” Molly said tersely.  
“I know Molls, I know,” Meena said, gentler now, “Look, I did notice how Tom looks. I thought maybe that would help. He’s a nice guy, stable, and I really do think you two would get on nicely. I just want to see you happy again.”  
Molly sighed. Since Sherlock ‘died’, she had been living a sort of half-life trying to move along with things. She had promised to at some point be up to being fixed up. But Christ, this Tom looked so much like Sherlock except not enough like it and perhaps that was for the best. It would be truly sad of her to try and make something happen with his exact doppelganger.  
Fine then, at least maybe it would be a few dates where she could maybe pretend a bit it was all like before. It wasn’t like they were going to get married.  
“Alright, but don’t get your hopes up.”  
Meena grinned, pulling Molly into a tight hug.  
“That’s my girl! I promise if he isn’t your thing I’ll never say a word about it again.”  
“You better not, we both know I know at least a dozen ways to dissect a person.”  
Meena wrinkled her nose.  
“Yeah, that might not be sort of talk to pull. Save it for the fifth date.”  
Molly snorted.  
“Assuming there will be one,” she replied, following Meena back into the pub and mumbling a lame apology to Tom.  
But there was a fifth date, and a sixth, and a tenth and soon she was meeting him to walk his dog, and soon they started calling it ‘their’ dog, and soon she was spending a lot more time at his flat than hers, and she had long since realized he really wasn’t Sherlock but just Tom, who seemed to really fancy her. It was nice, it was new, and somebody loved her back. Perhaps that was why it had been so easy to say ‘yes’ when he had asked her that question, THE question.  
And the following Christmas, she sat nervously in the usual booth waiting as Tom was off to his parents’ house where she would later meet him. She kept glancing at her hand, toying the with the band on her finger nervously. There was still the Ghost of Christmas Past to meet.  
“I see congratulations are indeed in order, Miss Hooper.”  
Mycroft Holmes slid quietly into the seat across from her, tucking his umbrella under the table.  
“Eliza isn’t with you tonight, then?” she asked.  
“And here I thought it was my brother who believed the best offense is deduction.”  
Of course he wasn’t going to answer her question. It didn’t matter.  
“It’s a recent development and it’s all very new but yes. I’m not getting any younger, as they say,” she said, chattering on nervously. ‘Good god, Hooper, small talk really isn’t your area,’ the voice in her head, which sounded suspiciously like a man she knew very well. “But...you already knew before you walked in the door, Mr. Holmes,” she finished, because of course Mycroft would have known.  
“And the postcards? Any new ones?”  
Of course he knew about those too. Was there any area of life this man couldn’t pry information out of?  
“Not in a while, actually. The last one was in August, come to think. Is something amiss?” she asked, trying to hold back the worry suddenly flooding through her.  
“Oh I’m sure he’s just deep in his little game, Miss Hooper. Mere mortals can’t really compete, can they?”  
“No,” she said, shaking her head, “But he’s only human despite what both of you think.”  
Mycroft tensed for a moment, then smirked a bit. It seemed insincere.  
“You are quite possibly the brightest of all his little goldfish. It’s more and more apparent why he trusted you over everyone else.”  
Even him, Molly knew. He hadn’t even gone directly to Mycroft first. It had been her. She should be flattered, if it wasn’t also such an awful burden to carry.  
“I assume that’s what you really wanted to know, so I should let you get back to your Christmas. I have to go meet Tom, anyway.”  
“Ah, yes, that’s his name, isn’t it?”  
Molly rolled her eyes.  
“I’m sure you have a file of paperwork saying as much. But since we’re having a nice holiday quid pro quo as usual, I have something to ask in return: let me tell him, if...when he gets back. I don’t want him hearing secondhand.”  
She wasn’t sure she wanted him hearing at all, should he return, but she knew in her gut he would be back if he succeeded. Despite what he thought, she knew despite anything else, that man loved London. He would miss being Sherlock Holmes. He would want to see John again. He would long for Baker Street. And she? Well, she wasn’t sure he was even sparing a thought for her while he was off deep in games of intrigue.  
But if he did come back, she would have to tell him, and she would not have Mycroft Holmes or anything else throwing it at him as a second hand comment. Even the British Government himself owed her that much.  
“You have my word, though who knows when he’ll be back,” Mycroft said, and Molly was surprised to hear a hint of sadness in his voice. These Holmeses, always thinking themselves so above it all.  
But it wasn’t her problem anymore, sadly.  
“Merry Christmas, Mycroft. Tell the same to Eliza.”  
“Merry Christmas, Miss Hooper. I think this will be the end of these visits but you have been most helpful.”  
He tipped his umbrella to her and left, she paid the bill and walked to train station to board her ride to Croyden where Tom waited patiently for her in his mother’s kitchen under the assumption she was wrapping up something at work. There were parts of her life he didn’t need to know, even if she was going to spend the rest of it with him.  
Strange how at that moment, the idea of a the years stretching ahead in his company didn’t elate her. But she shook it off as just residual nerves from what might likely have been her last ever meeting with Mycroft. Another door closed, another piece of Sherlock fading away from her.  
She wasn’t even sure when she had started crying, but by Clapham Junction she was burying her face in her gloved hands trying to feel anything but a gaping sense of loss. She took a few steadying breaths, wiped her face harshly, and stared at her reflection in the train window as she forced a smile.  
She would be happy, she would make herself be happy. She would move on. Tom was nice, normal, kind, he loved her, he was friendly, he didn’t cut people to the quick or say rude things, he was a good man, maybe not a great one, but good. He should be everything she wanted.  
Not every man she fell for had to be a sociopath. She almost believed it, too.


End file.
